Translation Feature

Editor's Note

Dear Reader,

The Cortland Review is proud to highlight the work of twenty-three talented translators as well as the personal essays on the translation experiences of six seasoned translators. We think we are the very first to offer translations alongside the amazing original poems we might never read, much less hear, except for these distinguished translators. Be sure to read and listen to the Albanian, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Hindu, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish presented here. You will be mesmerized by the music in all these languages.

Gracing the cover of this unique feature is the photography of Nelson Hancock, titled "Gotham." Just as our translation feature honors the then and now of poems, Hancock examines architecture and daily life to highlight the emergence of the presence out of the past. He achieves a monumental quality in a central feature to allow embedded histories to mingle with the present. His use of color includes the present in a more overt way. For more of Nelson Hancock's work, visit www.nelsonhancock.com or see his current exhibition up at James Samsum, Inc. in New York.

Hancock studied photography and anthropology at Princeton and earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Columbia. He retired in 2012 from the Pratt Institute where he directed the Critical and Visual Studies Program.

TCR thanks poetry editor Anna Catone for the idea for this feature and especially for her hours of work making it happen. Whatever is in these pages is here because poetry editors Anna Catone, Jennifer Wallace and Christian Gullette had something to do with it. Whatever is in these pages is also here because David Moody and Guy Shahar worked tirelessly to manually construct each HTML page so that it could accommodate bios and photos of the translator and co-translator as well as of the original poet, each poem in English and its source language, and audio in both; thus, this feature is TCR's gift of deepest interest, dedication and pure genius.

Happy summer! Grab a tall glass of iced tea or something else on ice and settle in for some wonderful surprises.